Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In a communications network, address resolution refers to the process of resolving a protocol address (e.g., Internet Protocol (IP) address) to a hardware address (e.g., Media Access Control (MAC) address). For example, address resolution may be required when a source wishes to communicate with a destination. To learn the hardware address of the destination, the source broadcasts a request message that includes a known protocol address of the destination. In response, the destination will send a response message that includes its hardware address. Other recipients are not required to respond to the broadcasted request message. In practice, the broadcast nature of the address resolution process may lead to various problems such as network flooding. Address resolution suppression is therefore desirable to limit the amount of broadcast traffic relating to address resolution.